Cannes Contenders 2017: Wieden + Kennedy

With the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity less than a month away, Campaign India returns with its 'Cannes Contender' series.

The premise is:

How much time really does a Cannes juror get to understand a case or piece of work s/he hasn't come across before?

Too little. It's up to us to help them get acquainted with the good work prior. We present here entries from Indian/South Asian agencies that their creators believe will be in contention for Lions at the 2017 International Festival of Creativity, Cannes.

Wieden + Kennedy Delhi has one such entry.

Nike Da Da Ding

Categories entered in: Film (TV and Cinema) and Film Craft - Use of Original Music.

For far too long sports advertising in India has been reliant on familiar crutches. Sixty seconds of ads that make heroes of sports men and women cheered on by adoring fans as if the pursuit of sport is only the purview of the few. To us, it felt unhelpful and prescriptive, reducing viewers to the role of spectators. So when Nike asked us to get a generation of girls to start playing sport, we knew we had to start from scratch.

It became very clear, very quickly that we couldn’t do another perfectly worded, sixty second manifesto for sport. We had to aim higher, we had to create something that lived on in girls’ phones. The answer lay in music. Or more specifically, in the spirit of girls being represented by the likes of Beyonce and M.I.A. The artists may be foreign, but the feeling is universal. So we set about pursuing the idea of a music video showing girls in a way they’d never been shown before. Strong, able, sexy. It would help change the image of sport. It would make sport more fun, stylish and accessible.

Da Da Ding was a personal mission from the beginning. A mission to address all the societal taboos that exist to date. Don’t go out in the sun, don’t get a tan, don’t ruin your skin. In short, don’t do anything that hurts your marital eligibility. These are not findings from some deep, extensive research. They are truths from average households. The hope with Da Da Ding was to get these very girls to go out and make sport a part of their lives. To get them to experience the incredible effect running, sweating and kicking can have in their lives. Above all, it was a rallying call for girls made with the express purpose of telling them that with a bit of sport in their lives, there really is no stopping them.

Want to get your agency's work featured here? Send in your contenders to prasad@haymarket.co.in raahil@haymarket.co.in.